‘The Path’ Recap, Season 2, Episode 11: I Just Dropped In to See What Condition My Condition Was in

Remind me: Which rung of the Meyerist Ladder endorses the Seinfeldian pop-in? Because by my count, almost a dozen fucking scenes in this week’s episode of The Path involve one character just popping in to see another.

Let’s see…

Gif: Hulu

Eddie pops in to confront Cal at the city center.

Eddie pops in at Richard’s place to tell him to arrange a meet with Hawk

Sarah pops in at Hawk’s solitary confinement cell to comfort him.

Cal pops in at Sean and Mary’s to encourage them to leave so his relationship with Mary won’t get discovered.

Gif: Hulu

Cal pops in at Sarah’s house for an ill-fated family dinner.

Eddie pops in to see Hawk at the city center.

Sarah pops in at Eddie’s place to confront him about his unexplained knowledge of her and Cal’s relationship.

Abe pops in at Eddie’s to confess he’s an FBI agent.

Sarah’s dad pops in at her place to slide an envelope under her door.

Sarah pops in at Felicia’s hotel room to confront her about her involvement with Eddie and Richard.

Shit, even in his dreams, Cal pops in at the cave where Dr. Steve Meyer is prophesying his impending doom.

Gif: Hulu

And I’m not even counting the prearranged meetings, like Sean and Mary talking to his mom and the cult reprogrammer she hired, or Sarah’s parents going to see her estranged sister Tessa, or Eddie walking into a trap at a bogus meeting with Hawk that’s arranged by Cal’s goon squad, or Abe meeting with his FBI peer to reveal that he’s been set up by his boss to take down the Meyerists in order to prevent them from exposing DeKaan, a major campaign contributor, as an environmental polluter, or Eddie meeting with Sarah’s dad in hopes he’ll raid the Meyerists’ files on all other deniers. A wise but sleazy man — i.e. a man not unlike Doc Meyer, apparently — once said “Showing up is 80 percent of life.” On The Path, it’s damn near 99%.

Confronting the sheer repetitiveness of this device in this episode made me feel a bit like Hawk. Sprung from “meditation” and “cleansing” in solitary confinement, he tells his once and future girlfriend Noa that the process has left him feeling more muddled about what to do with his life, not less. In much the same way, watching a show in which the plot is advances solely through various characters showing up at the residences or workplaces of some other character and shouting at them or lying to them about what they want to happen next made me confused as to how other shows even work. I remember The Young Pope flying by in a series of quick cuts and symbolist images — were they doing something wrong, or is there really another way to tell stories on television that doesn’t involve the logistics of getting characters from point A to point B, as if the script were nothing more than a wheelbarrow?

To be fair, there are moments in this episode that point to a different way forward. Abe’s discovery that his boss is using him as a pawn in a larger political game caught me by surprise, as did his subsequent move to ingratiate himself with Eddie, of all people. The ongoing duplicitous two-step between Cal and Sarah took on new urgency when Sarah learned that Sean and Mary were thinking about ditching the compound, a decision she intuits has to do with an unknown male predator in the ranks; She seems to know, but can’t admit to herself, that she’s sleeping with the culprit. And Eddie using his status as Doc’s chosen son not just for relatively noble purposes like ending the Meyerist’s mismanagement or ending the indefensible practice of cutting off contact with “deniers” but for sheer vengeful rank-pulling against Cal, rang true to that character given all he’s been through.

Gif: Hulu

But all the business-y bullshit that everyone has to go through to get to any of these points — all the car rides and hallway lurkings and door knockings and arguments on the threshold — it’s just pure wasted space. As a practical matter it makes next to no sense in a world where phones exist. But more importantly, it posits a world in which human beings only interact with one each other for reasons of righteous indignation or naked duplicity. You go to someone’s house, you bully them or bullshit them, and you leave. It’s a lot like Eddie’s silly blindfolded needle-threading exercise — the focus is on getting everything where the story needs it to be rather than asking why it’s going there in the first place. For a show that’s ostensibly about the deep truths of human existence…well, I kinda want to pop into the writers’ room and tell them what’s going wrong.